Rare side effect of brain injury: random accents

Saturday

May 29, 2010 at 12:01 AMMay 29, 2010 at 10:52 AM

WASHINGTON - Some people fall on their heads and wake up with their memories wiped out. A few revive with their personalities totally changed. Robin Jenks Vanderlip fell down a stairwell, smacked her head and woke up speaking with a Russian accent.

WASHINGTON — Some people fall on their heads and wake up with their memories wiped out. A few revive with their personalities totally changed. Robin Jenks Vanderlip fell down a stairwell, smacked her head and woke up speaking with a Russian accent.

Vanderlip has never been to Russia. She doesn’t remember ever hearing a Russian accent. She lives in Fairfax County, Va., and was born in Pennsylvania. Yet since that fall in May 2007, the first question she gets from strangers is: “Where are you from?”

“They say your life can change in an instant,” she said in what sounds like a thick Russian accent. “Mine did.”

For 42 years, Vanderlip, whose case is being studied at the National Institutes of Health and the University of Maryland, spoke with what NIH neurologist Allen Braun called a typical mid-Atlantic American accent. But since the fall, her clipped way with consonants — dropping the final “s” from some plural words, saying “dis” and “dat” for “this” and “that” or “wiz” instead of “with” — and her formation of vowels — “home” sounds more like “herm,” “well” sounds like “wuhl” — identify her more like a transplant from Moscow. The more fatigued she becomes, the thicker her accent grows.

What she has, Braun and other doctors say, is Foreign Accent Syndrome — a legitimate though rare and little-understood medical condition that can follow a serious brain injury. “It does sound strange,” Braun said. “It certainly does sound like someone has a foreign accent.”

The syndrome was first described by a neurologist in the closing days of World War II, when a Norwegian woman injured by shrapnel woke up from a coma speaking with a German accent. Fellow Norwegians ostracized her as a result, according to the medical literature.

Since then, fewer than 60 cases have been reported. Puzzled doctors have studied a Louisiana woman who, after a brain injury, suddenly began speaking with a Cajun dialect; a woman from the Newcastle region of England who speaks like a Jamaican; and a Boston man who developed what sounded like a Scottish burr. There are Americans who have developed British-sounding accents, Britons who sound French, a Japanese stroke patient with a Korean accent and a Spanish speaker with a thick Hungarian accent.

Scientists are quick to point out that these are not bona fide accents. (And none of the patients has spontaneously learned a foreign language.) Rather, in a way no one quite understands, the damage to the brain disrupts speech formation.

Shelia Blumstein, a Brown University linguist who has written extensively on Foreign Accent Syndrome, said sufferers typically produce grammatically correct language, unlike many stroke or brain injury victims. But subtle changes in intonation and melody make syndrome sufferers sound foreign. No amount of therapy, she said, seems to reverse that.

“I did have one patient who had a stroke and developed Foreign Accent Syndrome, then had another stroke and it disappeared,” she said.

Two days after her fall, Vanderlip awoke unable to speak. Terrified, a friend called 911 and Vanderlip was rushed to the hospital, where an MRI showed she’d had a stroke. Working with a speech therapist, she was able to make rudimentary sounds and slowly relearn how to speak — but with a Russian-sounding accent. The accent remained, even after Vanderlip regained speaking ability.

On her home answering machine, Vanderlip has preserved her old voice as a greeting. “Please leave your message, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.” She sounds easy, confident, articulate. And American. Her eyes redden when she hears it.

“When I sound different, people think that I’m different,” she said.

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